How to balance SEO and UX Design

We’re currently living in a time where brands rely on the powers of SEO and UX to make their brand and content stand apart from the rest of the competition. Not only do people want to stand apart from the rest on their field, but they also want to entice the biggest audience as well.

Over the last few years, website design has changed, many trends have come and gone. The same goes for SEO keyword trends. It’s impossible to predict the future, but we can still make some design worthy guesses about it.

In this article, we’ll be focusing on how you can balance SEO and UX.

What is SEO?

SEO means Search Engine Optimization, it’s generally known as the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website or blog through organic search engine results. This can generally be done by including words that are trending in your industry and by also interacting with your community. By making sure you do this you’re bound to see how fast your audience will grow in a short amount of time.

What Is UX Design?

User experience design includes a bunch of different disciplines—such as interaction design, information architecture, visual design, usability, and human-computer interaction. When people discuss UX design, you’ll often see people discussing ways to make the way people interact with a website simple and easy, sometimes even fun. UX will help your site be remembered and loved by the community that supports you. When you incorporate UX design into your site, you’re already ahead of the curve.

Balancing Usability

According to Moz when it comes to the quality of the site and balancing these two elements: “Usability and user experience…provide an indirect but measurable benefit to a site’s external popularity, which the engines can then interpret as a signal of higher quality. This is called the “no one likes to link to a crummy site” phenomenon.”

It’s up to you to find how you can incorporate SEO keywords into your blog while still making the blog stand out and function smoothly. A great way to do this is by making sure your blog has white space, this will allow the reader’s eyes to breathe, allowing for a more relaxing experience, while still being able to highlight the SEO keywords.

They Won’t Suffer

While yes, you will come across times when dealing with your website design where you might need to sacrifice UX for SEO and vice versa, but being able to find what works more in favor for your brand does not mean the two elements are not balanced.

When your blog or website takes advantage of UX and SEO, it’s up to you to find out exactly what will work the best with you and your brand. Every brand is very different, so it’s common that you won’t know what exactly works for you until you actually try it and see the response.

How To Find The Middle Ground

The middle ground to balancing SEO and UX design is to ensure that you’re retaining visitors on your site. If you can entice an audience to stay, not only will that show SEO that you’re site is of interest to the individual because they spent a longer time there, but it also speaks well for your design, because of the interaction with the individuals and the time they dedicated to that specific page.

A few great ways to incorporate a nice balance goes as follows:

Make sure your logo and navigation are clear so the user knows where they are.

Get rid of clutter, make sure everything has a purpose, which can ease the UX design and amplify the use of SEO keywords.

Try designing your site in any easy to use fashion so you can find the perfect balance that works for your unique niche.

Use subheaders in your blogs so you can organize your content, perfect to keep people engaged, this will also allow you to use more SEO keywords!

Conclusion

Whether you’re just starting out with a website or blog, or you’ve been around for awhile and want to refresh your work. It’s up to you whether or not you go out there and find what kind of balance of SEO and UX you will feel is the perfect fit. Like we mentioned before it is very important that you find what works for you because every brand is different.

Hopefully, these tools will stay with you and you’ll be able to make a difference with your brand. Get out there and reach a bigger audience, you got this!

My name is Irina, I am a certified specialist in advertising and public relations, journalist. For over two years I have specialized in design issues in various fields (interior design, web design, graphic design).